


Oh goodie, it's a hoodie!

by TheIcyQueen



Series: The CREEPiverse - A "ghost hunting" AU [4]
Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Awkward Crush, Crushes, F/M, Feelings Realization, Fluff, Mild Blood, Sharing Clothes, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25433737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: When Ashley unpacks from the CREEPs' failed expedition to the Blackwood Pines lodge, she finds something unexpected in her bag - Chris's hoodie. She should probably return it, huh? But...that would mean they'd (finally) have to talk about what happened in the lodge. And more importantly, uh, what happened in the kitchen.
Relationships: Ashley Brown/Chris Hartley
Series: The CREEPiverse - A "ghost hunting" AU [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790200
Comments: 12
Kudos: 17





	Oh goodie, it's a hoodie!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElliePollie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElliePollie/gifts).



> Now see, I told you guys I wasn't ready to let the CREEPs go ;P
> 
> Here's a little Chrashley fluff, SPOOKY GHOST EDITION!!! This takes place after the CREEPs leave the lodge, but before the epilogue.

Now, in her defense, it hadn’t been an _intentional_ theft. And honestly, ‘theft’ was way too strong a word for it…it wasn’t even what had happened! This had been a mix-up! A mistake! A real whoopsie-doodle of a switcheroo! …or at least she hoped it was, because if this hadn’t been something she’d accidentally done, then there was a very real, very significant chance that it had been one of Josh’s dead sisters who’d stuffed the hoodie into her bag, and like…

No. No, she wasn’t ready to deal with that possibility. Not when her stupid stitches had _just_ started to dissolve.

Either way it left Ashley with a problem she wasn’t totally sure how to tackle; namely, she had to figure out what to do with the hoodie.

 _Chris’s_ hoodie.

Their retreat from Blackwood Pines had been a lot of things—quick, panicked, uncomfortable, steeped in an endlessly awkward silence—but ‘organized’ wasn’t on that list. Hell, ‘organized’ wasn’t even in the same _zipcode!_ They’d all stumbled back down the mountain with their gear in tow, her and Josh both bleeding comically as they did so, and that had been that. No one had checked what they’d packed, they’d just freaking _packed_ so they could get the heck out of there.

Y’know.

Away from the _literal fucking ghosts_.

True to form, she hadn’t been able to even look at her bags, much less think about unpacking them, for a solid week after that. Every time she so much as glanced at her backpack, that awful creeping sensation of fingers poking around her brain returned, the strange chill of a voice she only half-heard prickling the skin behind her ears, and like…Hannah and Beth might’ve been sweeties when they were alive, but Ashley wasn’t exactly champing at the bit for another round of letting them pull her around by the strings like some sort of demonic marionette. So long story short, she’d thrown her bag into her closet and shut the door tight.

Until about fifteen minutes ago.

That’s when she’d found the hoodie crammed in with all her other stuff. And to be fair—to be _so_ fair!—she’d really, honestly, truly thought it was _hers_ at first. It hadn’t been until she’d started sorting everything that needed to be washed into piles. That was a story in and of itself, because she was still a little nervous she was going to stumble upon some splortch of ectoplasm, truth be told…not that there had _been_ any ectoplasm at the lodge…and not that ectoplasm _stained_ things…to her knowledge…but she was getting off track again! She’d realized something was up when she was sorting her clothes, because as she held the wadded-up hoodie in her hands, it occurred to her that it was way too big to be hers.

‘Probably Josh’s,’ she’d thought to herself at first, because leave it to Josh to make her do his laundry. Had she fractured his tailbone? Sort of. But that hadn’t really been _her_ fault, it had been _Hannah’s_ , so it wasn’t entirely fair that he’d expect her to do his laundry to make up for that, and…and that was right about the moment she saw the name written in big, white block letters on the back of the pullover.

The name was not, in fact, ‘JOSH.’ It was, in fact, ‘CHRIS.’

She’d been staring at it ever since.

See, under normal circumstances, the answer was obvious: Return the freaking thing. Simple! Easy as pie! Problem was, um…hmm, how to phrase it…she had kinda…been avoiding Chris since they’d gotten back. Not like, intentionally! …well, okay, intentionally. _Super_ intentionally. Not in a mean ‘I-don’t-want-to-see-you’ way, though, but in more of a mortified ‘I’m-afraid-I-will-literally-keel-over-and-die-if-I-make-eye-contact-with-you,’ way.

So. Okay, so…they hadn’t exactly bailed from the lodge _immediately_ after the whole possession thing. They’d left the next morning, which meant she’d had plenty of time to make an absolute, utter, goddamn, hopeless fool of herself.

Again.

Cuz the whole being an unwitting conduit for the dead shtick had been incredibly cringeworthy, now that she had time to think about it in retrospect. Like, who did that? Who let themselves get possessed? She hadn’t even read out of a creepy old book written in Latin and made out of human skin or anything! She’d just _been there!_ Ugh, it made her shudder to think about. Even still, that was nothing—absolutely _nothing_ —compared to what had happened…after.

Her idea of making hot chocolate was solid, and she’d stand by that. It had been a _damn_ good idea. Few things cured as many ills as a steaming mug of hot chocolate, marshmallows melting into foam on top, and she’d thought that it was precisely what the four of them had needed.

Had she intended on bawling her eyes out while making said cocoa? Yes, obviously. It wasn’t like they’d brought any K-Cups for the Keurig, so it was gonna take some time to heat up that soy milk (Sam’s doing), and in her book, heating up milk took up almost exactly the same amount of time as getting in one good existential weep. Fake psychic medium, _real_ flesh puppet for the dead, professional crier—every little girl’s dream _bona fides_.

But she must not have been too slick about using cocoa time as crying time because Chris had joined her in the kitchen as she struggled to find which of the million or so cupboards the Washingtons kept their pots and pans in. That hadn’t even been enough time for her to get a single solitary tear worked up!

“So that was, uh…a thing. That happened. Out there.” Ah, always so eloquent, Chris. But he’d reached up into one of the higher cabinets to pull out exactly the kind of pot she’d been looking for, so she’d let it slide without comment. “You okay?” he’d asked, lowering his voice only slightly, something about the words suggesting he’d cut himself off, or maybe had meant to say something else entirely.

“Yeah,” she’d said, trying to push past the discomfort of having to accept (1) that ghosts were real, (2) that ghosts could _very_ easily possess whosoever the fuck they wanted, and (3) that she’d been forced to learn both of those things the hard way only a few minutes ago. She’d wanted (still did, really) to move right into denial. Then repression. Then forgetting about the whole damn thing until she found herself in a therapist’s office at the age of fifty. But when she’d taken the pot from him she’d realized she _wasn’t_ okay, because all at once her hand had felt like it had been crushed by a cartoon character’s ridiculously oversized mallet.

She couldn’t really remember, but she must’ve yelled or made some kind of noise, because hardly a second later the two of them were wrapping her hand in a makeshift ice pack made of a dishtowel and a few ice cubes from the freezer, neither having noticed the awful purple-black bruises that had been spreading from her fingers towards her wrist until then.

“Spoke too soon, huh?” he’d asked, sounding like he was only half-joking.

“Yeah,” she’d said, absently echoing herself, only acutely aware of the ache in her fingers, the sting in the very corner of her mouth where the spirit board’s planchette had caught and split her lip. And she could remember _that_ much—she could remember feeling like a moron—because there she’d been, fingers sprained or maybe even broken, her mouth raw and a little bloody, her throat feeling as though it had been rubbed down with hot sandpaper from Hannah using her as a megaphone, every inch of her jostled and jangled and beat to high hell, and the only thing she’d been able to think about was how nice it felt to have him hold her hand in both of his like that.

The next part was fuzzy, in that she only partially remembered it. …which was to say, uh, she couldn’t really…put her finger on which one of them had moved first. She suspected it had been her. And really, even that was another gentle way of saying she was about ninety percent sure she’d been the one to do it, but her brain was doing its best to shield her from the added trauma of _knowing_ she’d been the one to do it with any certainty.

So the jury was (mostly) out on that one, but the result had been the same either way. She and Chris had kissed.

In the kitchen.

A lot.

Like… _a lot_.

And it probably would’ve been a lot _more_ , but one of them had moved just a little too suddenly, and then the cut on her lip had started to bleed _worse_ , and okay, again, who was to say, but they had _probably_ managed just fine for another few seconds anyway because she’d angled her face so he was only getting the side of her mouth that _wasn’t_ gashed open, but then the pain had kicked in and…that had been the end of it.

Eventually they’d made the hot chocolate. Then everyone had slept in Josh’s bedroom, squeezed together like sardines or scared little kids at a sleepover (she’d wedged herself between Sam and the wall, removing all chance of having to talk to Chris about what had happened). Then they’d left.

So while returning the stupid hoodie was the obvious thing to do, it was also…uh, a lot to consider. If she returned it, she’d probably end up having to talk to Chris, and if she talked to him, there was going to be that big, weird thing hanging in the air between them, and…and…and…

Ashley shoved it into the laundry basket and carried it towards the laundry room with a grunt.

***

She stared at her phone. Picked it up. Unlocked it. Let her finger hover over her text messenger. Waited. Put her phone down again. Dropping her head into her hands, Ash did her very best to disappear into the air.

This was stupid. This was stupid and dumb and babyish and she was being _such_ a moron. She and Chris were friends— _best_ friends! They hardly ever went this long without talking, and like…they’d always had that playful, flirting-but-not-really thing going on…hadn’t they? And, and he’d kissed her back in the kitchen! …hadn’t he?

Her fingers (the ones not in splints) knotted in her hair. From behind her, the horrendous screech of the dryer told her that the last of her laundry was done. The only solace she could find in the situation was that she was _home_ , meaning she could have this existential crisis in the privacy of her own personal space instead of the dorm’s communal laundry room. The _last_ thing she needed was for someone to barge in on her frantically bouncing back and forth between pep talks and panic attacks, muttering under her breath about ghosts and kissing Chris. As long as she could get a handle on herself before her mom got home, no one would ever have to know how badly she was freaking out.

Again, the freaking out thing was stupid. So, so stupid. So stupid! They’d been friends forever! Even if…that…had been a mistake, even if he didn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about him, even if she was just deluding herself by thinking his awful jokes and stuff were attempts at flirting when really they were just affronts to the art of comedy in general, well…sometimes friends made mistakes! She couldn’t just avoid him for the rest of her _life_ , that would be…ugh.

Embarrassed or not, the only thing on Earth worse than the thought of having to awkwardly find out her ridiculous crush on Chris was a one-sided deal was the thought of not having him in her life anymore. So…so one way or another, she was going to do… _something_.

Chris  
  
Hey  
  


Normally she didn’t text without punctuation, but like, what was she gonna do, send an exclamation point and look desperate? A question mark would’ve made her seem passive aggressive, an ellipsis would’ve been fucking ominous, and a period?! A period?! Absolutely not. No punctuation it was. She hit send and quickly dropped her phone onto the couch again, getting up to fold her laundry.

Chicken move? Definitely. But she knew she wouldn’t have been able to keep herself from sweating as she watched him type his response. Or… _not_ type a response.

Ashley tried desperately to put it out of her head, folding her clothes and sliding hangers into her shirts for later. It didn’t take nearly as long as she would’ve hoped, and it was only about five minutes later that she found herself left with the final piece of laundry.

The hoodie.

Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she left the laundry room and picked up her phone, moving carefully all the while, as though afraid of setting off a motion alarm. She swallowed hard when she saw she had a new notification.

Chris  
  
hey yourself  
  
how’s uh  
  
everything  
  


Ashley didn’t let herself sit. Nope, she squared her shoulders, made up her mind, and just went for it.

Chris  
  
Okay! My hand’s still a little rough but what can you do.  
  
oh good  
  
Yeah.  
  
You?  
  
uh you mean besides the soul crushing knowledge that josh was right about paranormal shit and no one will ever believe a word we say about life after death and the fact that apparently mountain curses can be REAL??????  
  
Yeah besides that.  
  
oh  
  
p good thx  
  
Glad to hear you’re taking it in stride.  
  
But hey um I was unpacking today finally and I don’t know how it got into my bag, but I think I have something of yours.  
  
???  
  


Instead of spelling it out, she popped back into the laundry room for a second, grabbing his hoodie. She laid it out on the arm of the couch and snapped a quick picture, sending it his way. The little ghost logo on the front came out slightly blurry in the low light, only adding to its general air of spookiness.

Chris  
  
aw snap is that my hoodie?  
  
i was wondering where i put that shit  
  
could you imagine how pissed josh’d be if we lost our company uniforms  
  
I’m actually pretty sure he’d be relieved.  
  
Might finally give him an excuse to order ones with the RIGHT name on them.  
  
hey call me crazy but i feel like maybe the creeps are done with creeps  
  
at least for the like  
  
the foreseeable future  
  
Yeah I’m with you on that one.  
  
so who knows???  
  
maybe we CAN be the crepes now  
  
Oh my God.  
  
dibs on strawberry  
  
Ha ha.  
  


She bit her lip, then remembered her doctor’s warnings and quickly released it. Here they were…and here _she_ was, about to do…something.

Chris  
  
Anyway…do you want me to come drop it off or something?  
  
I can’t move back into my dorm for another week, but I could have Mom drive me to campus tomorrow if you want/need it back ASAP, it’s no problem!  
  


That time his response wasn’t so immediate. Ashley stared down at her phone’s screen, watching the little ‘…’ bubble appear and disappear over and over again before she finally let herself sit, warily eying the hoodie as she waited.

The temptation to put it on had been, in a word, _strong_. And that was dumb too! It was so, so, so, so, _so_ dumb! It was just a crappy pullover with a stupid little ghost on it, literally nothing more than an identical—if not slightly larger—version of her _own_ hoodie! The only difference was the name written on the back. The only difference was, well…it was Chris’s.

The thought of wearing it heated her face up until it almost _hurt_. That was a dating thing, a _boyfriend_ thing…the sort of thing she regularly caught herself daydreaming about if she wasn’t careful.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

Chris  
  
oh uh don’t worry about it i don’t need it back right away  
  


Well he’d sure taken his sweet time writing _that_ sentence, hadn’t he?

Chris  
  
Oh okay, if you’re sure.  
  
yeah it’s no big  
  
but if you like  
  
WANTED to come to campus we could def hang out  
  
or whatev  
  


Ashley frowned, rereading those last few messages a couple times.

Chris  
  
So you DO want the hoodie?  
  
no i don’t like  
  
need it  
  
But I should come bring it to you…?  
  
that’s not  
  
okay uh  
  
hmm  
  
?  
  
the invite and the hoodie aren’t necessarily related  
  
Oookay...?  
  
i'm just saying  
  
if you wanted to hang it’d be cool  
  
with me  
  
and like josh too but  
  
Who cares.  
  
right  
  
but i'm not saying you should come with the express mission of dropping that off or anything  
  


That was when it began to dawn on her. Slowly at first, then it crushed her with all the weight of, well, a giant metal sculpture dropping from the ceiling. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—let herself get her hopes up, but there was a spike in her adrenaline that was impossible to ignore, forcing her to type a little slower to keep from misspelling everything.

Chris  
  
So I should come visit…but hang on to the hoodie.  
  
if you y’know  
  
want to  
  
What if I showed up at the apartment with it though? Would you refuse to take it?  
  
wh  
  
that is a batshit insane thing you just asked me  
  
You’re the one being weird and vague!  
  
weird sure  
  
but vague? i'd never  
  
Oh my God.  
  
This is…  
  
Are you trying to like…say something about like…me hanging onto this?  
  
i thought I was being v clear in my desires and intentions ash  
  
Yeah super clear. Do y  
  


She’d hit send before she’d meant to. Something _else_ had just occurred to her. Chris’s odd, nervously veiled statements were one thing, but this? _This?!_ Ash furrowed her brow in quiet disbelief before asking a question she was coming to suspect she knew the answer to.

Chris  
  
Are you the one who put it in my bag??  
  
...  
  
in my defense  
  
i thought maybe you’d find it a LOT faster  
  


She put her phone down just long enough to grab one of the couch’s pillows and scream into it like the star of some sappy teen movie, her feet kicking a little against the couch as the glee _burst_ out of her.

Chris  
  
You are UNBELIEVABLE!  
  
okay rude  
  
Why didn’t you say that in the beginning?!  
  
i  
  
okay look  
  
i was kind of…concerned that uhhh  
  
the radio silence was like  
  
because of what happened at the lodge  
  
not the ghost shit the uh  
  
kitchen  
  
stuff  
  
and i was MAYBE worried you were trying to  
  
idk  
  
let me down gently or  
  


She didn’t let him finish whatever else he’d been planning on saying. Before she could talk herself out of it, she sent two more quick messages:

Chris  
  
See you tomorrow.  
  
<3  
  


His response dinged her phone just as she pulled the hoodie on over her head, and while she didn’t immediately turn to check what he’d said, she had a pretty good idea she already knew.


End file.
